For Pavin, It’s Luck, Timing and $150,000 : Golf: He dominates the first day of the Skins Game. Jacobsen is the only other earner with $30,000.

It seems as if Tom Watson, Fred Couples and Peter Jacobsen have been around the Skins Game a very long time, probably since they started printing money, so guess who the big winner was on the first day?

That would be Skins Game rookie Corey Pavin, so new to the event that he thought Bighorn was a tuba.

Just to prove that experience counts for, oh, nothing, Pavin spent Saturday at Bighorn scooping up $150,000 in Skins Game cash and stuffing it into his golf bag.

But at least he had to work for it. He needed two shots.

First, Pavin knocked a 25-foot chip shot into the bottom of the hole for an eagle to win $100,000 on No. 5. Then he made a $50,000 birdie putt from 15 feet on No. 7.

Those two shots tied Couples’ record for the most money won on the first day of the Skins Game, but it didn’t exactly inspire Pavin to great heights to explain his good fortune.

“It’s all timing,” he said. “It’s just a matter of luck.”

In that case, nobody had better timing or was luckier than Pavin, which means that someone is going to have to do something today to keep the U.S. Open champion from making even more money.

“And what a juggernaut it is,” Jacobsen said.

Jacobsen was the only other player to win any money Saturday. The former Skins Game commentator, who traded his microphone for golf clubs, rolled in a 25-foot birdie putt on No. 8 to collect $30,000.

Watson and Couples were blanked, but they were not exactly speechless. After Pavin holed his chip shot from the back fringe, Couples joked: “Does this mean the hole is over?”

Yes, it did. But there are nine more holes to play and $360,000 still destined to line somebody’s pocket today.

It might as well be his own, or maybe Watson’s, Couples said.

“Tom and I are going to have to come out and get one early, if we can,” Couples said. “And if we don’t fall down.”

If Couples had been able to get the ball to fall into the hole on the par-three fourth hole, when his chip shot hit the flagstick and bounced a few inches away, he could have changed Pavin’s payday.

“I really thought that was going in,” Couples said.

Watson’s best chance came on the same hole. He had a 15-foot putt from right of the pin, straight uphill. He missed it.

“I dogged it,” Watson said.

Actually, there had been an earlier animal reference. A jackrabbit ran across the green and through a bunker on the third when Jacobsen was putting for birdie from four feet. He made the putt.

Watson pointed out that it was obvious Jacobsen read the putt correctly.

“Like my caddie Bruce [Edwards] said, it broke a hare,” Watson said.

Jacobsen said he never saw the rabbit, but he had a clear vision of the line of the five-footer he made for birdie on the ninth. That putt halved the hole with Watson and carried over a $30,000 skin to the 10th today.

“It’s like a sudden-death playoff on every hole,” Jacobsen said. “It’s hell-bent for glory each hole and just see how it goes.”

For Pavin, how it went was gently rolling right into the hole for five skins on the fifth.

“All I had to do was get it out of the long grass and it was going to roll straight to the hole,” Pavin said.

“I’m fortunate, but anything can happen. There’s a lot of money still out there.”

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A million-dollar putt? John Brinson, 45, a retired army officer from Goldsboro, N.C., had his name pulled from 500,000 entries to try a 10-foot putt for $1 million Saturday at Bighorn.

He missed. The ball hit the left side of the hole and rolled past. But Brinson got a consolation prize of $50,000 from Gillette.

“The putt felt like a million dollars,” Brinson said. “I still feel like a million.”

Said Pavin: ‘I was more nervous watching him hit the putt than he was.”